The hose leaked and slippery ponds formed in an instant where the water fell. The wind sawed into one’s marrow in this utterly exposed position.
A head popped up and called off all the men but Holtzer and Dick.
“You fellers hold her down as best you can!” it shouted. “Keep a watch and don’t let it break through—come on, the rest of yer!”
They worked in silence on Dick’s part, and with a continued rattle of what Mary Ellen would think of this from Holtzer. It wrought harder and harder on his companion’s nerves, this prattle—indeed, such waves of rage came over him that he entirely forgot where he was.
Meanwhile the crowd below—gathered in strong numbers in spite of the weather and the hour—were wondering what must be the thoughts of those men standing over a furnace, a hundred feet from the ground. What could either man think of but the danger? The danger of one’s daily work? There is no such thing.
This was a commonplace fire which soon would be well in hand. It had not in the least turned the current of the thoughts of the two men aloft who formed the spectacle, while the household gods below made burnt-offerings of themselves. Then, as if to show that no fire is commonplace, a giant flare sprang from the corner of the building, poised in the air for a moment, then, overthrown by the wind, toppled toward the firemen. They leaped back—one to safety; the other, slipping on a treacherous skin of ice, to fight vainly for his balance for a second, and then to plunge down the mansard roof, speeding for that hard ground so far away. It was a trained man who fell, though. He turned as he went, instinctively gripping with his hands, and they caught—the edge of the cornice—an ice-covered edge to which they clung miraculously, while his body dangled in the wind.
So Dick, safe, looked down at Holtzer, for whom it was a question of seconds, while the roar of pity from the crowd buzzed in his ears.
He might well have done nothing. No man could go down the steep slant unsupported. Nothing was to be seen of Holtzer but his hands, lighted by the flames; hands that could not clench even, as to grip would be to force loose, but which could only make stiff angles of themselves. It would all be over in ten heart-beats, for to take it as we are doing is like examining the moving pictures one by one at leisure, instead of as they live upon the screen.
Then Dick moved. He ripped off his coat, soaked the arm of it in the hose stream, pressed it to the roof, where it froze fast on touching, and slid down his improvised cloth ladder, held only by the strength of the ice-film that bound the sleeve to the tin.
Before his frantic fellow-firemen below could scale the fence with the jumping-sheet he had hold of Holtzer’s wrist with one strong hand. The strain was terrible; he felt the coat yield with a soft, tearing sound, his head spun, yet somehow he managed it, and there they stood on the cornice together.